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My Father and Me: A Spy Story

It was just a favor to dear old dad. But the next thing Nathan Nicholson knew, he was jet-setting around the world under cover and selling state secrets to the Russians. You know what they say: Like father, like spy

On a Saturday morning in the summer of 2006, as the sun climbed over the farmlands of northwest Oregon, Nathan Nicholson drove from his apartment in Eugene to a federal prison two hours away in Sheridan to visit his father, Harold "James" Nicholson, the highest-ranking CIA officer to be convicted of spying.

The visit was a fortnightly ritual for Nathan, one that had punctuated the last decade of his life, from adolescence to the threshold of manhood. Sitting behind the wheel of his blue Chevy Cavalier, he glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. His face was boyish, handsome, with blue eyes and blond hair mowed down to a crew cut. As he sped along Pacific Highway West, which cuts a near-straight path through lush green flat country, he had occasion to reflect upon a lost dream.

In the mirror, Nathan would have liked to see the man he'd always aspired to become: a confident Army Ranger—the spitting image of his father, Jim Nicholson, decades before. Instead, Nathan saw a 22-year-old Army washout, a young man who had failed Ranger training and had left the military without ever having stepped onto a battlefield. While his friends were fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sending back pictures of themselves in tanks and Humvees, Nathan was studying drafting at a community college and working at a Pizza Hut. There was an ignominy in this contrast, this chasm between what Nathan could have been and what he had become. The only escape from it was the fantasy world of video games in which Nathan immersed himself, sometimes in the company of cousins who lived nearby, sometimes alone. In this world, Nathan could be a hero, vanquishing digital enemies with deft toggles of a joystick and rapid clicks of a mouse.

In a jail cell at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Jim Nicholson groomed himself in front of a mirror, as he did every other Saturday in anticipation of his son's visit. As a star agent for the CIA, he had once donned suits and worn a Rolex. Now his wardrobe consisted of prison fatigues that draped his six-foot-tall frame with indignity. Such was the price of betraying one's country: ten years of life taken away, thirteen more to go. The time in prison had aged him. At 55, his beard was flecked with gray, which he took care to mask—especially before meeting his son—with the help of an old toothbrush and shoe polish. In the grand scheme of things, it would prove to be a minor deception whose only aim was to preserve, in Nathan's eyes, his image as a debonair father, international man of mystery.

Jim Nicholson was one of 2,000 convicts at Sheridan, a minimum-to-medium security prison that could pass for a sternly fortified boarding school. Outside the low-slung buildings, inmates grow rows of lettuce and tend rosebushes. Inside, the visiting room looks like a Greyhound bus terminal, with rows of blue plastic chairs and flat fluorescent lights. Vending machines hum on one side, behind a line that prisoners aren't allowed to cross. On his visits, Nathan would walk over that line to get things for his dad: a Twix bar, a hamburger. There were other favors, too: buying Christmas presents for his dad's old friends, sending Nicholson a P. G. Wodehouse novel. But none of these would compare to the task his father had in mind today.

Father and son sat shoulder to shoulder, and the conversation inevitably turned to a familiar topic: the family's financial troubles. Nathan still owed eight grand on his Cavalier. His sister, Star, shouldered $50,000 in student loans, and Jeremiah—the oldest of Nicholson's three kids—was $25,000 in debt. As they spoke, Nicholson leaned into his son. He said he'd thought of a way to help the family from prison. It involved contacting his "old friends"—the Russians—who owed him some money. His plan would require Nathan to do something that was dangerous but not illegal. Would he be willing?

Nathan looked into his father's eyes. Though his words sounded like a casual suggestion, they were as forceful as any command.

···

From the very beginning of his twenty-six-year tenure at the CIA, Jim Nicholson had been a star operative. Long and fit, with a handsome bearded face, he fancied himself an American James Bond, dressing in expensive tailored suits and gaining a reputation as a risk taker. At his first posting, in Manila, he showed a relentless drive and appetite for adventure, earning the nickname Batman for his successful work alongside a young officer nicknamed Robin. "They were the hot-ticket young case officers," Norbert Garrett, the former station chief in Manila, told GQ in a 1998 feature story. "Good-looking and able and aggressive and energetic. You could never give them too much to do."

After Manila, Nicholson was stationed in Bangkok, where in the early 80s he was frequently dispatched across the border into Cambodia to spy on the Vietnamese. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the agency, bolstered by a remarkable ability to recruit foreign agents, and in 1990, at the young age of 39, he was made station chief in Bucharest, Romania. But the relentless drive that had propelled Nicholson upward was laying waste to his personal life. His wife, Laurie, alleged that he'd had affairs in nearly every posting. The marriage, weakened by years of strife, crumbled in 1992. Nicholson later won custody of the kids and took them to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—his next assignment—where he served as deputy station chief. It was there, in the summer of 1994, that Nicholson "crossed over" and started a clandestine relationship with the Russian spy service, the SVR.

His decision to betray his country, by Nicholson's own account, was triggered by some combination of greed, ego, desperation, and anger at his agency bosses. The CIA had recently turned down his request for a year's extension in Kuala Lumpur, where he would have had free housing, a swimming pool, and a maid. The mortgage he'd have to shell out on his return to the United States, combined with alimony payments, meant that the cushy expat life he'd been living was over. "He felt that not being given the extension was a major slight," said Tom Connolly, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case along with his colleague, Rob Chesnut.

Nicholson systematically started supplying the Russians with information shortly after arriving at his new post: instructor at the CIA's training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia, known in U.S. intelligence circles as "the Farm." The leaks included the bios of more than 300 CIA trainees, many of whom were preparing to work on covert missions overseas under diplomatic cover. It was a betrayal for which the United States would pay a price for decades to come. "There are CIA officers who cannot be posted overseas in hostile environments even today because Nicholson gave up these people's identities," Michael Rochford, a former chief of the FBI's counterespionage section, told me.

In October 1995, Nicholson failed a routine polygraph test, raising the first red flags about his conduct. In 1996, the FBI began reviewing his financial records. Oblivious to the ongoing investigation, Nicholson adorned his office at Langley with every plaque and award he had won. He put up a poster-sized picture of himself on the wall. "He thought he was gorgeous," Kathleen Hunt, a former CIA agent who worked for Nicholson, told me. "He'd go to a tanning salon. He always dressed nicely. He never had a hair out of place." Nicholson made no secret of the fact that he was unhappy about being at headquarters. "He viewed himself as a field guy," Hunt said. "He would frequently mention that it was very expensive to live in the United States compared to living abroad."

In the fall of 1996, as Nicholson was boarding a plane for a trip to South Africa and Rome on a counterterrorism assignment, FBI agents surrounded him on the tarmac. In the months prior, investigators had gathered stacks of evidence against him, including proof that he had been photographing classified materials under the cover of his desk. At Dulles airport in Washington, Nicholson was carrying in his hand luggage ten rolls of film and a diskette containing U.S. government secrets that he planned to deliver to the SVR. After over two years working with the Russians, meeting with agents in New Delhi, Jakarta, Zurich, and Singapore, Nicholson had sold classified information for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In court, Nicholson was hardly contrite. At his sentencing in June 1997, he told the judge that he had done it for his children, to compensate "for the long hours at work and for failing to keep my marriage together." But while it was true that he had spent some of the money on the kids, including $12,000 that he'd given to Jeremiah to buy a new car, he'd also spent lavishly on beach vacations with his Thai girlfriend and put a large chunk of cash into a Swiss bank account.

Nathan Nicholson

During debriefing sessions with federal officials, Nicholson complained about the length of his sentence. He didn't think his leaks had put any lives in danger. Besides, in his experience, everyone in the field already knew who was a spy or a double agent. Rather than lock him up, he felt the CIA should have turned him against the Russians. They were wasting his talent.

In Sheridan, Nicholson quickly set about cultivating an aura of respectability. He became a prominent figure in the prison ministry, leading prayers and Bible studies. In the spring of 2000, he became friends with a new inmate named Phil Quackenbush, who had robbed banks in Las Vegas—never with a weapon—to fuel a cocaine addiction. "I saw the man cry over his children," Quackenbush told me.

In church gatherings, Nicholson wore the serene, cerebral air of a man on a spiritual quest. He helped write morality plays for the prison's holiday production. Using a typewriter borrowed from the prison secretary, Nicholson spent months authoring what he told Quackenbush were his memoirs. He penned a book about etiquette that he hoped to publish, each page containing a little blurb on the appropriate etiquette for a particular setting. "I asked him, 'Jim, what are you, a fucking doctor of etiquette?' " Quackenbush told me. "And he told me about parties he'd been to, parties for presidents and kings—how he had to infiltrate them. He had to become an expert in etiquette because of his job. He prided himself on his education, his experience as a CIA agent, his pay grade."

In conversations with Quackenbush, he spoke bitterly about the government. He was angry at how the CIA had changed in his last years at the agency. "When we got a new warden, he explained how the guy was just a puppet of the bureaucracy," Quackenbush said.

Sitting in prison, Nicholson's bitterness grew. He would show the government that he wasn't just another federal inmate rotting away in a jail cell. All he needed was an accomplice, someone he could control. He needed his younger son, Nathaniel.

···

Nathan was 12 when his father was hauled away to prison. To Nathan, his father's crime would forever remain a television news story hovering on the edge of emotional reality, a speck of dust easily washed away by innocent tears. He would always remember Nicholson as Pa, the man who'd cheered for him at Little League baseball games, helped Nathan's brother, Jeremiah, with Boy Scout activities, and took Nathan's sister, Star, horseback riding.

After Nicholson's arrest, the three kids spent some time in the care of their nomadic mother, Laurie, at one point having to live out of a car for two weeks. Eventually they moved in with Nicholson's parents, Marvin and Betty, at their home in Eugene. The kids would come to see Nicholson in prison every other Saturday; Marvin and Betty visited on the alternate Saturdays.

A shy teenager given to blushing easily, Nathan made few friends. His favorite pastime was playing Nintendo games. After finishing high school in 2002, Nathan enrolled at Oregon State University but dropped out after a semester, hoping to become a Ranger like his father.

In 2003, after basic training, Nathan was sent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but didn't make it through the Ranger initiation. Instead he became a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne. There, while making a routine jump, his dream of a military career collapsed. He fractured two bones above his tailbone and injured his shinbones.

"After the injury, my world came to a halt," he later wrote. "I found myself in a severe state of depression.... I felt that I had lost my value to my company." Depressed, he went home to visit his mother in Corvallis, only to get into a heated argument with her husband, Bill. The fight got so ugly that as Nathan was leaving, his mother told him that it might be best if he did not come back. "I took her word to mean that she didn't want me to come back from my deployment alive," he wrote. "This turned my depressed state into a suicidal state."

Returning to the military base that night, Nathan was moments away from slitting his wrists when his father called from prison. He hadn't heard from his dad in months. God asked me to call you, the father said. I am very proud of you, and I love you very much. When the call ended, Nathan sought counseling. "I dropped the knife and immediately called the sergeant for help," he wrote.

Nathan owed his father his life. So on that summer day in 2006, when his dad laid out his plan in Sheridan's visiting room, Nathan nodded in assent, with the guards looking on.

Since all Nicholson's correspondence was monitored by the CIA, Nathan would be his courier. Nicholson had already devised a plan for sneaking messages out of Sheridan: Nathan would buy snacks from the vending machines and put them along with brown paper napkins on a seat next to Nicholson. His father would pile up the wrappings on the seat, carefully dropping a few balled-up pieces of paper among them. Nathan would then take the pile to the men's room, retrieve the note, tuck it into his shoe, and toss the rest.

Over the next few visits, the two rehearsed, Nathan sneaking past the guards with note after note. For proof of identity, the father-son team got their picture taken together in the visiting room's designated photo area, standing in front of a picture of Oregon's Mount Hood. Nicholson also gave Nathan a letter of introduction. In twelve short weeks, Nicholson had trained his son in the art of spycraft.

···

On October 13, 2006, Nathan drove ten hours south through the night to San Francisco, stopping at a rest area to shave and put on a suit. In the morning, he arrived at the Russian consulate, a six-storied brick building with a Russian flag fluttering above. Twelve years earlier in Kuala Lumpur, his father had walked into a building bearing the same flag to volunteer his services to the SVR. Nathan's visit, however, was brief. The head of security, Mikhail Gorbunov, led him to a soundproof room, took his notes, and gave him forms to fill out, telling him to come back in two weeks. Nathan left dejected, but Nicholson encouraged him to return to the embassy as instructed.

When he did, the about-face was stunning. The big Russian greeted Nathan as one of his own, hugging him and apologizing for his standoffish behavior. He asked how Nathan's father and siblings were doing; then—just for security purposes—he requested that Nathan draw a sketch of Sheridan's visiting room. Nathan obliged. Smiling, Gorbunov handed him an envelope with $5,000 in $100 bills. And that was it. Gorbunov told Nathan that it was not safe to meet in the United States. For the next meeting, in December, he should visit the Russian consulate in Mexico City.

On the drive back to Eugene the following day, Nathan felt as if he had a purpose for the first time in years. He got a phone call from his old man. Like all Nicholson's phone calls, it was recorded.

"Well, is everything working okay over there?... Are the tires holding up and everything?"

"Oh, yeah, oh yeah, everything's working all right," Nathan said, sounding like a man in total control.

···

What did the Russians want with a man like Jim Nicholson after a decade of imprisonment? While the CIA won't comment on the case, I spoke with the FBI's Robert Anderson, Jr. who supervised the Portland investigation from Washington. In part, he told me, the Russians were hoping to identify any missteps in their handling of Nicholson. He described it as a form of spycraft quality control. "Any intelligence service is always looking to see how they can run operations better," Anderson said, likening the process to replays of a football game. What the Russians learned from Nicholson was only one piece in a big puzzle, he said. "We don't know what other facts or other information they've had over the years about different investigations. To me, it is a logical step to try to put the pieces together."

Harold "Jim" Nicholson, after his arrest in 1996

Michael Rochford, who spent a career at the FBI countering Russian espionage against the United States, says that what the Russians were trying to do with Nicholson was fairly routine. "I can parallel this to the way the U.S. government looked at the loss of our intelligence assets between 1985 and 1994 when our recruited agents in Russia [Russian spies working for the U.S.] were getting investigated, tried, and ecuted over there," Rochford told me. U.S. intelligence officials couldn't understand how those spies were getting caught. "What we did in the intel community between the FBI and the CIA was to try and get ahold of the families of the ecuted assets, or assets that were in prison but not ecuted. We would try to interview them at different locations around the world about the circumstances of their arrest."

Whatever the Russians may have learned from Nicholson's messages, there's no question in the minds of intelligence officials that his plot was driven not so much by money as by bitterness. "He wanted to show that the U.S. government couldn't control him in jail, that he was still valued by the SVR, that he could still hurt the U.S. in a vengeful way and get some capital out of it," Rochford told me. He looked into the distance, narrowed his eyes, and shook his head. "To use your son in that way is just unbelievable."

···

In December 2006, Nathan flew to Mexico City. It was his first opportunity to experience the international life of intrigue his father had always told him about. But as he walked out of the airport terminal, he was consumed with the task on hand.

As instructed, he took a cab from his hotel to the consulate, a white building with tall arches and columns, where he met his new handler, a graying Russian named Vasily Fedotov. Short and stocky, Fedotov had retired from the Soviet clandestine service in the '90s after a long career that included a short stint at the Soviet embassy in D.C. in 1986 as head of counterintelligence. But the SVR had activated him now to handle the Nicholsons.

Fedotov led Nathan to a room that appeared soundproof, where he sat down to study Nicholson's notes. Fedotov told Nathan to tell his father that he had received Nicholson's letters (What letters? Nathan thought), then asked the boy to convey a series of questions to his father. They were all related to Nicholson's capture. Who had interrogated him? When did he suspect he was under surveillance? Nathan jotted down the questions in a notebook. Fedotov watched him scribble, then made a suggestion. Better to use code, he said.

Nathan ignored the advice, writing "cause and effect" above the questions as a reminder that they were about the circumstances leading to his dad's arrest.

Fedotov asked Nathan about his cover for traveling to Mexico. When Nathan explained that he planned to say that he was interested in Mexico City's architecture, Fedotov suggested he pick up some brochures from the city's architecture school. Nathan nodded but had no intention of following through.

Fedotov handed Nathan a brown paper bag with $10,000, then looked at a calendar. He told Nathan to return to Mexico City for another meeting during his next break from college, in the summer of 2007. The transaction had been a breeze. Nathan had more money in his pocket than he knew what to do with. He could have blown some of it on a late night out in Mexico City. Maybe woo a girl like his father had. Instead, he spent his remaining days holed up in his hotel room, playing games on his PlayStation and listening to his iPod, venturing out once to buy a sombrero and other knickknacks for his cousin.

Nathan didn't truly enjoy his success until returning to Sheridan, where he basked in his father's praise. Nicholson told his son that he had outperformed even his trainees at the Farm. Nathan relayed Fedotov's questions, having copied them from the notebook onto his arm and hand. Over the next few weeks, Nicholson wrote down his answers on paper notes, detailing the circumstances of his 1996 arrest. He may have been followed from Malaysia to Singapore.... A contact he'd met with in Singapore may have been "tainted."... This person was "someone off the screen" and not a Russian intelligence officer....

Though he knew he shouldn't, Nathan read the messages. His father had provided specifics: the name of the polygraph examiner on his case, the existence of secret tunnels running between two countries. Suddenly this all felt very real. Just as Nathan was starting to worry, his father reached out. In letters from prison, he exhorted Nathan with praise, quoting lines from scripture: "Before you were born I set you apart and anointed you as my spokesman to the world." Unbeknownst to Nathan, he had become an animated character in a game whose controls lay in his father's hands.

···

The FBI won't disclose how it got tipped off to Nicholson and his son, but agents began investigating shortly after Nathan's second trip to Mexico. The investigation was led by FBI Portland's Jared Garth, a fast-talking native New Yorker who worked alongside special agents Scott Jensen and John Cooney. With court permission, the officials put Nathan under surveillance.

On December 5, 2007, the FBI installed an electronic tracker on Nathan's car. Three days later, when the agents got in to work, they discovered that the vehicle was parked at the Portland airport. Jensen described it as an "oh shit moment": Losing Nathan's trail—especially if he didn't plan on coming back to the U.S.—would be a blow to the investigation. Searching through phone records, agents found a call Nathan had made to his girlfriend at three in the morning, telling her good-bye from the airport. Jensen drove out to the airport with another agent, and the two went from one ticket counter to the next to find out Nathan's airline, eventually learning that he had taken a Continental flight bound for Lima, Peru, connecting through Houston.

While the FBI was playing catch-up, Nathan was in Lima, trading state secrets for $10,000. His father had sent him, along with the details of an escape plan he wanted Nathan to convey verbally. It involved landing a helicopter on FCI Sheridan's helipad, airlifting Nicholson out of the prison complex, and dropping him off the coast of Oregon, where a waiting submarine was to take him away. To ensure that he was correctly identified during this getaway, Nicholson had tattooed his blood type, "O+", on his arm. Fedotov laughed at the delusional proposal. If the Russians acted upon it, he remarked, it "could start a war."

Moreover, Fedotov was not happy that Nathan had failed to follow the instructions he'd given him in Mexico City. Nathan was supposed to have confirmed his plans for Lima by leaving a message in a Mexican account that Fedotov had set up. He never did. Fedotov told him not to make the same mistake before traveling for his next meeting, in Nicosia, Cyprus. He also gave Nathan instructions on a secret signal and pass phrase to use there.

When Nathan returned to the States, landing in Houston before his flight to Portland, Garth and Cooney were waiting. They had Customs and Border Protection agents pull Nathan out for a search, and from behind a one-way mirror they watched as his luggage was opened. "Nathan was stone-faced the whole time," Garth said. "At one point, I put on a CBP badge and pretend like I'm reviewing the search, pacing up and down the floor so that I'm able to overhear the conversation between the two inspectors and Nathan."

CBP agents found $7,013 in Nathan's belongings, $4,000 of it tucked into the inside cover of a PlayStation video-game case. When they asked why he had so much cash, Nathan answered that he had left the U.S. with some $9,000 in cash because he had "mad out" his credit cards.

In Nathan's backpack, CBP officials found his notebook and, in his wallet, business cards covered in notes. While Nathan sat there seemingly unconcerned, one of the officials brought the notebook and the cards into the back room, where Garth and Cooney hurriedly photocopied them.

"The contents were pretty telling," Garth said. Scribbled on the pages were instructions on where and when Nathan was to go for the meetings in Lima and Cyprus. There were several sheets filled with questions that he was to convey to his father and instructions for him if he managed to get out of prison: "If Dad gets out, get passport ASAP. Travel to country nearby Russia. Up to him (Dad) (i.e. Finland).... Have him go to Visa section of Embassy (Friends)" The pages also listed the Yahoo account, Jonemurr2@yahoo.com.mx, that Nathan was to use to confirm the meeting in Cyprus.

It was all there: espionage in plain sight. But Garth and Cooney weren't sure the cryptic notes would hold up in court. The customs agents let Nathan go, and the agents brought their evidence to two assistant U.S. attorneys in Portland, Pamala Holsinger and Ethan Knight, who decided to proceed with a criminal case. "The question was, is this meeting in Cyprus going to happen? Should we wait until that time?" Garth said. They decided to wait and see.

···

Nathan was now under constant surveillance. The FBI bugged his apartment, recorded his phone calls, and photographed him. Peering into his world, the feds saw a man with one foot firmly planted in adolescence. He lived with his girlfriend and regularly worked out on a Bowflex machine to counter his all-pizza diet. When he wasn't playing video games, he spent hours watching Kung Pow movies—martial-arts spoofs. A rare break in routine came when he attended an anime convention in Portland; he drew a tattoo and wore red contacts to look like a cartoon character.

Agents noted that Nathan was accommodating to a fault, forever anxious to please others. In calls recorded by the FBI, he offered his brother pointers on ercising. He comforted his sister after a breakup, assuring her that the right guy would come along. When Nathan's girlfriend's sister needed her roof fid, he spent hours on her rooftop laying shingles. On the weekends, Nathan attended sermons at the Door Christian Fellowship church, until he had a falling out with the pastor, who Nathan felt had made an insulting remark about Nathan's father.

At a generation's distance from the Cold War, Nathan seemed oblivious to the significance of his actions. But he had been jolted by the search at Houston airport, and now the thought of going to prison flitted through his mind like a troubling shadow. Worried about being monitored, he stuck a tape across his attic door so that he would know if anybody entered his apartment. His father had warned him about surveillance and taught him to use reflections in storefront windows to see if anybody might be following him.

Meanwhile, agents continued to monitor the Mexican Yahoo account that Fedotov had instructed Nathan to use. In May, they saw a message sent from the account, matching the instructions that Nathan had written down in his notebook. The subject line of the message was "Hola Nancy." In part, the message read: "It looks like I will still be able to go on that vacation!" The weekend after Thanksgiving, the FBI sent an agent into the Sheridan visiting room to eavesdrop on Nathan and his dad. The Cyprus meeting was on.

···

For once Nathan did exactly as Fedotov had instructed: On the evening of December 10, he walked from the Hilton Hotel in downtown Nicosia to a TGI Friday's, wearing a baseball cap. He waited there on the sidewalk, holding a backpack in his right hand, chewing gum, and glancing at his watch as cars drove past. At 7 p.m., Fedotov arrived, wearing a black coat and his trademark sunglasses. "Do you know the way to the post office?" he asked with a smile.

"It should be around here somewhere," Nathan answered dutifully.

The Russian led Nathan to a dark blue sedan parked nearby, and together they drove twenty minutes to an underground parking area.

In the darkness, Nathan gave Fedotov a six-page letter his dad had mailed him from prison. It contained Nicholson's health information and details about Jeremiah's posting at the Tyndall Air Force base, where he worked on electronic warfare. Nicholson, it seemed, was offering the SVR not only his own services but the possibility of recruiting Jeremiah, his more accomplished son.

Nathan did not bring any handwritten notes to Cyprus. At the end of the meeting, Fedotov spelled out when and where they were to meet next: on the evening of December 16 a year later, outside a subway station in Bratislava, Slovakia. Fedotov gave Nathan $12,000 in $100 bills and wished him merry Christmas.

It was past midnight on December 15 when Nathan flew back to Portland. Snow was falling, whitening the streets under the streetlights. By the time Nathan got back to his apartment, dawn was only an hour or so away. The neighborhood was blanketed in a hushed silence. Tossing his backpack on the floor, he sank into a slumber.

Then came a loud knocking.

Half asleep, Nathan opened the door to agents Garth and Cooney. He calmly offered the agents a drink; they declined. When they reviewed his background information, telling him that they knew he had no criminal record, he volunteered that he'd once been issued a $500 citation from the U.S. Park Service for chipping bark off a tree. He lied about his travels, saying that he had been meeting with "battle buddies" from his time in the military. Cooney, a square-shouldered agent with a piercing gaze and a calm air, finally told him that his account of his overseas trips did not match what the FBI had learned.

After a moment's silence, Nathan said he hadn't done anything illegal. But the confidence with which he'd been delivering his rehearsed answers was gone. In a gentle tone, Cooney offered Nathan what he described as a mulligan—a do-over tee shot in golf.

Nathan took it.

Over the next several hours, he narrated the details of his life as a spy messenger. When Garth informed him that he may have violated a law that forbids acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign power, Nathan remarked that he'd never heard of such a violation. Garth said he knew it was not a well-known law. "It's a little bit like when you were cited for chipping bark off a tree," Garth told him.

At Sheridan, Nicholson was far more reticent in his interview with Jensen, who began the conversation by laying down a postcard on the table that said Greetings from Cyprus. "I told him that Nathan would never have taken on this assignment on his own, and that he should cowboy up and do the right thing on behalf of his son," Jensen said. "He essentially said, well, he was aware that his boy had done some traveling, but just to go see some battle buddies. He played Mickey the Dunce the whole time."

Searching Nathan's apartment, agents retrieved the notebook the FBI had copied at the Houston airport. But Nathan had torn out any incriminating pages, realizing, belatedly, that their contents might pose a risk. He had, however, written down the location of the next meeting in Bratislava, attempting to disguise its significance by writing the name of his sister-in-law, Anastasia, above the meeting location. Try as he might, Nathan was no spy.

The FBI's questioning left Nathan with a strange sense of relief, even though he didn't know how the future would unfold. After two years of keeping a secret from his family and friends, he was finally free to share it. He called his sister, Star, to apologize. When he explained what he'd been up to, her first response was an incredulous "Dude?!" He told her he wouldn't be able to buy her a Christmas present: The FBI had taken his money. But he did not think he was going to prison, and thankfully the FBI hadn't taken away his Wii.

On January 29, 2009, an indictment was unsealed in the U.S. District Court of Oregon, charging father and son with acting as agents of a foreign power and laundering money. The FBI's Garth and others led Nathan out from his apartment in handcuffs and booked him into the local county jail. Ever since he had learned that his father had been put in solitary confinement at Sheridan, he had taken to sleeping on the floor to punish himself. Although his father had engineered the plot, he told investigators, he felt responsible for it.

On December 7, 2010, Nathan was sentenced to five years of probation. The judge ordered him to volunteer 100 hours of service to the Veterans Administration. On January18, 2011, Nicholson was marched into the courtroom in shackles. Sitting in the front row, Nathan leaned his head on a family member's shoulder and wept. Nicholson, in his way, finally took responsibility for corrupting his son. "Your honor, in my life I have been through several coups, I have been through a revolution, and I have been through a war," Nicholson said, reading from a statement. But the worst day of his life, he said, "was the day I learned that my young son had been arrested and charged with acts for which I am responsible." He said he had turned to the Russian Federation to help his family but had realized in the past two years of solitude that "all my children ever really needed from me was my love."

Judge Brown was unmoved, noting that not once had Nicholson asked the forgiveness of the United States. She sentenced him to eight additional years in prison; he is now scheduled to be released in 2024, from a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. The Bureau of Prisons declined my request to interview Nicholson, citing security concerns. Nathan, too, declined to speak.

Jeremiah was the only child willing to comment. "My father is a very charismatic and likable man," Jeremiah wrote to me in an e-mail. "Perhaps it was because our father had been imprisoned for the better part of my brother's life and he wanted to feel a connection to him, something that he may have felt he lost being separated from him for so long. I honestly don't know."

It's unclear if Nicholson failed entirely in his plot. Officials believe that Nicholson may have sent letters to the Russians before Nathan's involvement, and his cellmate, Quackenbush, told me about an inch-thick sheaf of "memoirs" that Nicholson had him mail to his parents, Marvin and Betty, after Quackenbush's release from county jail in 2002. That package may have been intended for the Russians.

On a windy February evening, I drove to Marvin and Betty's house in Eugene and knocked on their door. Marvin, who is Nicholson's stepfather, is a short and pleasant man who seems remarkably spry for his age. He invited me in cheerfully, and stepping into the hall, I got a silent nod from his wife, a plump woman who was sitting on the couch watching television with her feet up and curlers in her hair.

Marvin and Betty maintain that they never received any package of the kind Quakenbush described. They didn't allow me to press them on the matter. Outside, on the porch, wind chimes tinkled in the breeze. The sound carried into the house, and standing in the hallway, I felt as if I were listening to the anthem of a private nation walled off from the rest of the United States, the nation of Nicholson, the only nation to which he now appeared to swear his allegiance.

This may have been the nation that Nathan inhabited during the two years of his secretive travels. Not anymore. In the letter to Judge Brown, which he gave to her before his sentencing, he said he was finished with living the spy fantasy his father had lured him to dream about. He had finally realized that he wanted to live for himself, not for his father's approval. Since his release from county jail in April 2010, he wrote, he had completed over eighty-four college credits and transferred to Oregon State University, where he was now studying sustainability engineering. "Ultimately, I decided I needed to stop living like a child with my head in the clouds, and start acting like a man."

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science_ magazine in Washington, D.C. and a contributor to The New York Times, Wired, Discover and_ The Atlantic.